Torture

[SHRED]

Torture doesn't work.

But some would rather listen to their base level emotions rather than listen to Professional Interrogators.

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Or listen to Army Col. Stuart Herrington, a military intelligence specialist who conducted interrogations in Vietnam, Panama and Iraq during Desert Storm, and who was sent by the Pentagon in 2003 -- long before Abu Ghraib -- to assess interrogations in Iraq. Aside from its immorality and its illegality, says Herrington, torture is simply "not a good way to get information." In his experience, nine out of 10 people can be persuaded to talk with no "stress methods" at all, let alone cruel and unusual ones. Asked whether that would be true of religiously motivated fanatics, he says that the "batting average" might be lower: "perhaps six out of ten." And if you beat up the remaining four? "They'll just tell you anything to get you to stop."

Worse, you'll have the other side effects of torture. It "endangers our soldiers on the battlefield by encouraging reciprocity." It does "damage to our country's image" and undermines our credibility in Iraq. That, in the long run, outweighs any theoretical benefit. Herrington's confidential Pentagon report, which he won't discuss but which was leaked to The Post a month ago, goes farther. In that document, he warned that members of an elite military and CIA task force were abusing detainees in Iraq, that their activities could be "making gratuitous enemies" and that prisoner abuse "is counterproductive to the Coalition's efforts to win the cooperation of the Iraqi citizenry." Far from rescuing Americans, in other words, the use of "special methods" might help explain why the war is going so badly.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A2302-2005Jan11.html

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1. Torture does not yield reliable information
2. Torture does not yield information quickly
3. Torture will not be used only against the guilty
4. Torture has a corrupting effect on the perpetrator
5. Torture has never been confined to narrow conditions
6. Psychological torture is damaging
7. Stress and duress techniques are forms of torture
8. We cannot use torture and still retain the moral high ground


http://www.cvt.org/main.php/Advocacy/TheCampaigntoStopTorture/WhatCVTknowsaboutTorture